


pocket medic

by pocketpauling



Category: HLVRAI - Fandom
Genre: M/M, both of them. autistic. i make the rules, evil powerade i adore you so much, post canon silly stuff, tf2 meetcute
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26911549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketpauling/pseuds/pocketpauling
Summary: darnold plays tf2. darnold plays a lot of tf2. darnold plays a lot more tf2 now that black mesa is dust - but now some idiot medic main is following him around, and that idiot medic main is kinda funny and silly and sweet and - no he's NOT going to date a man over tf2. he wont. he cant.
Relationships: Darnold/Benrey
Comments: 28
Kudos: 117





	1. oh my god please stop using the overdose at least pick the blutsauger

**Author's Note:**

> SFSFKDFBFDDFS FOR MOTHREY AND RAT!!! YOU MADE ME THINK SO HARD ABOUT THIS I HAD TO WRITE ABOUT IT!! darnold special interest tf2 makes me SO happy u dont understand. them meeting accidentally post canon in some stupid pub bc darnold likes to crush valve servers for fun and benrey likes to fuck w ppl? hell yes? 
> 
> its also an excuse to show both how much and how little i know about everything in this game.

Team Fortress 2.

It’s a video game. It’s a video game that Darnold has played hours of - days, in fact, if you wanted to count it. And that didn’t make it good. 

It’s a bad game. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a bad game. Catch him on different days and ask him the same question and his answer will wildly differ. It’s a great game, it just has a bad community! Or, it’s a terrible game, and the crates are just a cash grab! Or, it’s the perfect game, and the art style and the mechanics merge to create a truly great experience - blah, blah.

He could talk for hours about it in any particular direction you wanted. Wanna talk shit? Sure. Wanna gush about it? He’s down.

It led to one awful, awful fact about him, though. He watched, over the course of that weekend, as the playtime counter on Steam slowly but surely ticked up, higher and higher - to 20,000 hours.

Eight hundred and thirty three days of the worst game on Earth, the game he’s been playing since the year it came out.

It’s not even a discouragement - he’s going for the ultimate prize, anyway. 69,420, a number no one has yet to reach. It was his goal, and even though he knew he wouldn’t get there before the idlers - or Scrap.TF, or the other market bots - he still wanted to try. He wanted to get there naturally.

Play the game. Be kinda good at the game. Two things he could do and be. He didn’t really _like_ bragging, but, God - if you’re kicked from every other server for suspected aimbotting, you _have_ to be doing something right.

It doesn’t help that he tends to flick his mouse up every time he lands a headshot, though. What’s funny to him really is _not_ funny to whatever 15 year old he just killed, but he’s not responding to the slurs people throw at him in chat, not tonight. He’s going to stomp this stupid pub and then he’s going to go stomp another, because it’s been a hell of a month for him, and this is what he’s been doing to blow off steam.

God. It sure _has_ been a month. It’s been a hell of a month, and he’s sitting in his stupid chair in his office at home, today, half eaten cup ramen forgotten beside him on his desk, and he’s playing this game instead of working like he’s meant to. Like he has to do from _home_ , now that Black Mesa is a hole in the ground, because capitalism doesn’t sleep, and the wheels keep grinding them all to paste, and Black Mesa exists in _some_ capacity on the East coast, where they’ve continued to demand his “potions.”

Fuck it. The potions can wait. He has to counter snipe on 2Fort, like God intended.

Well. He _would_ be counter sniping on 2Fort, if this fucking medic stopped walking out of second spawn and right into his line of sight, asking to high five. In game, in chat. They weren’t even doing the taunt half the time - just asking for a high five. The poor guy ended up taking a bullet to the head for him, once or twice, just for them to stroll back out and right into the same position. Every single time.

So no battlements. Which is fine, it’s not his favorite place to set up shop anyway - right up the stairs from enemy sewers was his favorite place to pick people off. Walk off battlements and into pond, pray that there’s no nest at the bend in sewers, and up the steps. Easy.

Easy. Easy, but that meant the medic followed behind him too. Friendlies are… endearing, but they’re easily annoying if they latch onto you, and a medic using the overdose? _And_ the vita-saw? _And the vaccinator_? They’re definitely fucking around. They’ve got, like, 2 points on the scoreboard. They’re fucking with everyone.

They’re definitely fucking with Darnold. They’re healing him, probably idly, and cycling through the resistances as fast as humanly possible while still moving in circles - so Darnold figures whoever this is, they’re using another key to reload, at least.

Well, that’s at least a sign that they aren’t new at using it. R for reload is fine for people who don’t use that medi-gun a lot. So they, at least, had less of an excuse for when they fucked it up.

The medic pops a bullet resistance the moment Darnold peeks his head out of the stairwell, and he’s greeted with a mini the second he walks further into the doorway. 

He’s immensely glad for the minimal brain activity the medic is showing - it makes it easy to beat the absolute shit out of the thing before the engineer can come find out who’s fucking with his stuff. Which, in turn, means he’s got more time to set up in the back of that room with this brain-dead friendly medic and charge up for the inevitable heavy that rounds the corner seconds later. Which, of course, absolutely is what happens. At least he was prepared for it. 

But the medic doesn’t sit in the room with him, they’re up and about, poking their head out the doorway, shooting at the walls, at the ceiling, at _Darnold_. Stopping in front of him and obscuring his vision, using the same high five taunt - Darnold suspects it’s the only one they _have_.

So he gives in. Just this once. Just this once, he responds, high fives the idiot. Just to shut them up. And, at the same time, he’s killed from the opposite side of the room by some _other_ idiot. 

The sound plays on the server. You know the one. The killfeed shows the story to everyone there: machina body shot collateral. Darnold leaves instantly out of sheer embarrassment.

* * *

The brain-dead medic, steam user balls.com, adds him not 10 minutes later, and Darnold checks their profile - empty, but not in a bot kind of way. Screenshots and screenshots of games Darnold’s never going to play, dozens and dozens of badges and comments containing in-jokes from a few friends, all a year old or more. 

It’s sad to see, a little bit. So he accepts, and checks the hours played on some of his games.

He’s a little bit shocked to see TF2 is hovering at around 1,000. There’s a lot of shock, actually - how the _hell_ could this person boot the game up after this long and still find enjoyment out of fucking with random people on a dead game from 2007?

That’s - well, it’s hypocritical. Darnold knows the enjoyment that comes from focusing down one particularly annoying asshole until they leave the server. He knows how funny it is to follow spies around to blow their cover. He knows how, at around this hour count, he was spamming annoying, terrible binds and painting everything he owned lime just to piss people off - he _knows_.

A message from the guy pops up a few moments later - 

_balls.com: lol didnt mean to get you killed_

Well, at least he’s taking responsibility. Even if it's weird to friend a person just to message them an apology.

_balls.com: was funny tho  
balls.com: luv the machina luv the dumbass sound like  
balls.com: ffffwwwwwPPAAHHHH WOO!!!!  
balls.com: fun stuff_

Darnold has to think for a second. Like, yeah, actually - as embarrassing as it was, it _was_ funny, objectively. If he had watched that happen to someone else, he probably would have cried laughing over it. Clip it and put it in the folder. So that’s what he sends back.

_darnold duck: yeah!! yeah it was funny i guess_

_balls.com: after u left the entire server went friendly rip  
balls.com: wanted to fuck em up w/ u didnt mean to fuck THAT up_

_darnold duck: it’s good! it was just kinda embarrassing  
darnold duck: didn’t know you had as many hours as you did  
darnold duck: thought you were new or something_

_balls.com: nah i just played uhhhhhhhhhh big time ago  
balls.com: long time  
balls.com: been a while. all this new shit is wild huh. the fuck is an “organ”  
balls.com: and how do i collect it as scientist man_

Oh. Man, an old player. He should check this guy’s backpack the next time he’s awake. Which he’s about to not be, if his body and schedule have any say in it. 

He types out a million responses, a whole lot of them questions, like - what made you start playing again, or do you have any questions about new items, or do you wanna play together sometime, or what’s your Discord tag so they didn’t have to use Steam - but he just sends “lol” and turns off his computer for the night. 

Because he’s got stupid fucking potions to work on in the morning, and 1 AM is _really_ pushing it.


	2. you ever play tf2ware? that game is hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> friendship. its when you ,re friends

Darnold likes this guy.

When they’d found time a few days later, he’d assumed that they’d be queuing to, like, _Upward_ , or something - but this guy just suggested trade maps, TF2ware, full sniper duel servers, _anything_ but the regular game. Renamed themselves ‘read ded,’ put on cowboy themed cosmetics, and bothered anyone they could.

And Darnold didn’t hate it. Not like usual. He’d avoided this side of community servers for years, but it was mostly because there’s less anonymity here. Like, if he embarrassed himself, it wouldn’t be wiped from the record like a casual match. And people could be even worse on servers like this, circlejerking in their little communities, run by people you don’t know. At least with Valve, you know who owns the servers.

With this guy, though, their little community server tour was fun. It was fun. It was _funny_.

It was even funnier the first time the guy unmuted in-game, a rush of static that Darnold knew meant this guy was _swallowing_ their mic, followed immediately by shouting, and, God, they’re _peaking their mic_ \- it laid Darnold out. And each time after, it caught him off guard, again and again it was like the funniest joke he’s ever heard. The guy’s voice is too fucked up to understand, fully. Like they’re in a cup, or they’ve got the mic half in their mouth, or they’re using, like, a DSi to talk to everyone. It didn’t happen too often, but it was like a little gift every time. It instantly turned whatever frustration Darnold felt towards the game into laughter.

It’s on a Hightower server, trying to hold their terrible little sentry nest on the central tower, when people start shouting at them in the voice chat. And Darnold lets the guy know, in party chat, that he’s going to mute it, before people start saying the worst words they can think of, when the guy says no, not yet. Just wait. Watch this.

So Darnold waits, and the guy unmutes and shouts, “Redempting!”

Which, in and of itself, is just a word. Not a ‘real’ word, but at least it was understandable enough. Confusing, though. It quiets down most of the server in an instant.

It was followed, almost instantly, by the words: “Intainteracteractives! Heists, riding, horseback rival charactive - “

Darnold wasn’t meaning to unmute, but he does, trying to find WASD through tears and the disorientation that was this guy’s ability to spout nonsense off the cuff. He presses his push-to-talk button for just a moment, projecting his laughing fit to the entire server. Which, in a surprising turn of events, shocks the guy into cutting off their speech - trailing off into quiet laughter that didn’t sound anything like the shouting he’d heard from them earlier. Familiar, but mostly in the way that most people’s voices are - there are only so many ways to make words work.

The guy leaves a second later, and Darnold follows them.

Before he can even think enough to send a message asking if they’re okay, he gets a message first. 

_read ded: discord please  
read ded: discord? steam message bad. please thank you_

Darnold sends his tag without a second thought.

* * *

Darnold _likes_ this guy.

He’s learned the guy’s name. Or, at least, what he’s comfortable calling himself - oh, and pronouns, too. So that’s a plus. They’re in a couple mutual servers, mainly streamers neither of them cared about enough to check the notifications for. He has a silly YouTube with a few videos, more nonsense - Darnold’s never found this kind of humor that funny, but this guy’s different.

And, uh, his name’s Ben. That’s what he said it was, at least. So… that’s what it is.

The moment he added him, Ben started flooding his DMs with image after image, the _same_ image, an edited Steve from Minecraft with human legs, jeans, and it _sucks_ to look at, a little bit - but the image is named ‘pature.png,’ and that’s what does it for Darnold. His _face_ hurts from laughing so much, and then Ben is sending increasingly pixelated versions, and Darnold thinks he’s going to _die_.

Ben does stop, eventually. Only after there’s about a hundred of this single image, but he _does_ stop. They talk. About TF2, and then about Slime Rancher, mods, Subnautica’s DLC, and, hey, do you want to play something? Together? Like, not just TF2, but something else?

 **ben -** Today at 11:32 PM **  
**like we can uhhhhhhh you got games right  
you got game  
s

 **ducke -** Today at 11:32 PM **  
**oh yeah uh! i have games. yeah. games  
i don’t really play most of them anymore but you know.  
you can search for games we have in common though  
its a thing you can do on steam?

 **ben -** Today at 11:32 PM **  
**oh shit they have that???dam  
ok ill lookie  
:]

Ben gets back to him a few minutes later, with an overly-dramatic response, whining about Darnold’s lack of multiplayer games. He can only laugh a little in response, because he’s never really thought about how his favorite games tended to be singleplayer. Or, in the case of TF2, multiplayer games where you can convince yourself you’re the only sentient person currently playing.

The conversation drops off after that, and Darnold assumes he’s lost interest, when he gets an email - and then a notification on Steam - about a gift. 

It’s - uh. It’s Terraria, and he’s had it for console for _ages_ , now, and he’s been meaning to get it on PC. But it slips his mind every time. And the little description on the gift, it says, ‘pspspspsps. how did you not own this game. come closer. we’re are going to mod this game to the hell??

Best wishes, bemny’

He has a feeling, and he double checks it - and he’s right. It’s the first time he’s gotten a gift on Steam. Well. That’s something.

* * *

Darnold _likes this guy_.

Ben keeps his promise. They call, sit awkwardly in silence for a few minutes, before Ben breaks it with some nonsense, which sends Darnold into a laughing fit - and Ben laughs in response, softer, like before. Like a normal conversation. Not one where he has to eat his pop filter.

They _talk_. Out _loud_. They talk, and Darnold has things to say - and Ben doesn’t say anything about his slight stutter, or how he tends to trip over his words if he talks too fast. They talk about the same stuff from before, but it’s easier, somehow. 

It’s easier the longer they talk, too. Darnold launches into explaining Slime Rancher speedrun strategies, and Ben asks question after question, fully invested, promising to pick up the game and check it out and let Darnold know his opinions.

They don’t even _touch_ Terraria. Darnold didn’t even download it. It’s sitting on his to-do list, along with evil potion flavors, and figuring out what he’s bringing to the Coolatta-Freeman potluck. His to-do list that’s being sidelined for how this guy seems genuinely interested in what he’s got to say, besides a few silly questions and the same style of nonsense he’s been spouting the entire time. But it’s subdued now. Not over-the-top. He’s making himself understandable, and it’s a nice thought that he’s doing it for Darnold’s sake. 

When they finally stop the call, somewhere around 3 AM, Darnold goes to bed feeling a little less stressed than he has in the last few months. It’s nice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its MY version of darnold i think he can like ducks. i think darnold can like ducks and his hitsound is the quack sound and i think he can have duck themed unusuals. i think he can have duck theme. i think he can duck theme online


End file.
